THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 4, 2013 79
at issue; the law that the chefs and the
restaurant were charged with violating
covers all cetaceans, endangered and
not. In a sense, they were accused of not
understanding that in America whales
and their relatives have achieved the sta-
tus of household pets.
Brian Vidor built his businesses around
the thrill of eating the forbidden: tiny in-
sects downstairs, massive endangered spe-
cies upstairs. One place represented rapa-
cious, greedy devouring of all the world's
creatures, the other broad-minded, virtu-
ous globalism; one was theoretically sus-
tainable, one likely not; both challenged
notions of what is appropriate food. Vi-
dor's lawyer entered a not-guilty plea, too.
After leaving the courtroom, he summed
up his client's position and, as far as I
could tell, the attitudes of those who ate
there and distanced themselves when the
dark side of their thrill-seeking was ex-
posed. "He owned the restaurant, but he's
a Caucasian, he's a fun-loving guy---he
wasn't involved day to day."
In food, the forbidden can be espe-
cially alluring. I once spent an after-
noon with a Hindu Brahman seller of
exotic meat, eating yak sausage and talk-
ing about his poor, disappointed vegetar-
ian mother. With animal-rights activists
fighting to keep the old taboos intact and
to establish new ones, adventurous chefs
and diners have begun to operate under
their own meat paradox: the less accept-
able something is, the more delicious it
seems. Not long ago, Animal, a restau-
rant in Los Angeles that has helped
make pig ears and duck hearts fashion-
able, held a fund-raising dinner to fight
an impending ban on foie gras in Cali-
fornia. In the kitchen, I listened to a
group of chefs lament the growing list of
meats Americans can't eat.
A line cook said, "Whale is the beef
of the sea."
"We had it in Japan," Vinny Dotolo,
one of Animal's chefs, said. "It was
amazing. I was, like, I understand why
people are eating this."
"Horse!" Michael Voltaggio, the
chef at Ink, in West Hollywood, said.
"It sounds so much fancier when you
call it cheval."
The French eat horse; so do Bel-
gians, Dutch, Mexicans, Chinese,
French Canadians, Central Asians. In
Italy, it's weaning food; in Japan---
where horses are reared specifically to
be eaten---it's sashimi. Horse meat is
red, bloody, and unmarbled, and is said
to be reminiscent of venison. (Venison,
apparently, is the chicken of the alt-
meat world.) It takes a lot of grass to
make a little bit of horse; they require a
third more pasture per pound of body
weight than cows, and metabolize it
more quickly, too. Given a choice, peo-
ple have preferred to use horses as work
animals, for transportation, and as in-
struments of war. In the first millen-
nium, the Catholic Church, threatened
by the stubborn pagan habit of ritual
horse-eating---it was tied to Odin wor-
ship in Germany and Scandinavia---
took the unusual step of banning it.
Mostly, the ban was successful; only Ice-
land, which made exemption from the
ban a condition of conversion, persisted.
The logical argument in favor of horse
meat has been around for centuries. Why
let the calories of retired farm animals go
to waste? Parisians discovered horse the
hard way, as a food of last resort during
the Revolution; by the mid-nineteenth
century, intellectuals were promoting it as
a cheap, nutritious, and tasty solution to
the problem of hunger. The zoologist
Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who
championed the cause, recommended
horse by saying that "it has been sold in
restaurants, even in the best, as venison,
and without the customers ever suspect-
ing the fraud or complaining of it." In
"The Curiosities of Food," published in
1859, Peter Lund Simmonds, a British
journalist who fashioned himself as a Vic-
torian-era Herodotus, reported, "Horse-
flesh pie, too, eaten cold, is a dainty now
at Berlin and Toulouse, and boiled horse,
rechauffé, has usurped the place of ra-
gouts and secondary dishes!" But trusty,
tin-eared Anglo-Saxon---"horse-flesh
pie"---was not the way to introduce the
delicacy that, Simmonds said, was "at
present the rage" in Europe's dining clubs
and salons. At home in England, mem-
bers of the Society for the Propagation
of Horse Flesh as an Article of Food
hired French chefs to prepare banquets of
chevaline. Previously, the English had
known chevaline by the name "cat food."
Anxieties about sustainability also
prompted another intellectual, Calvin W.
Schwabe, the "father of veterinary epide-
miology," to urge a reconsideration of the
obvious, spurned protein. In 1979, he
my only cookbook, the one that
accompanied my New Year's
resolution to make more soup), and
my mother looks glazed as she scrapes
it around on her plate.
In August, we scatter Sarah's ashes
in her garden. You have a choice of
distributing them with a spoon or with
your hands. I choose hands, because
there is a wait for the spoon, and also it
seems squeamish. Afterward, we move
inside for a big lunch, the kind that
Sarah would have prepared effortlessly.
Since the day Sarah died, my
mother has been inordinately focussed
on food preparation. My father is
supportive of the initiative, though he
can swing far in the other direction:
once, when I was in high school, my
mother went away for a week and he
insisted we use nothing but plastic
utensils and paper napkins.
Gordon, the man behind the
meal, has a sense of humor that lies
somewhere between the Catskills
and Rikers Island. He tells me, a
glint in his eye, "I added some ashes
to the paella."
"Funny, funny," I mutter. I've
always found paella kind of
pretentious, a food that wants to be
everything and is therefore nothing.
Much like the mid-nineties trend of
wearing a skirt over pants, it seems the
height of indecision. But everyone
regards the pan of tiny squids and
clamshells and fatty sausage as if it
were a great work of art.
On the car ride home, my mother
breaks the silence to announce,
"Gordon put ashes in the paella."
"He was joking!" I shriek from the
back seat, as if I were four again.
"I don't think he was," she says. "I
think he put a small amount of ash
into the paella."
"No, he didn't," Grace snorts.
"He was joking," my father says
firmly, keeping his eyes on the road.
"And anyone who'd believe otherwise
is just out to lunch."